Archive for September, 2016

this is an addition to what I’ve already written in the previous 2 lists…here and here

A short discussion with a bunch of younger friends yielded one important insight about what to look out when buying an apartment/condo…

You see, buying a home is a risk. You risk of spending a fortune buying a home that could suck. Believe me, the odds are against you if you’re as dumb as I think you are (I’ve seen a lot of sohais getting their shit ruined because they couldn’t deign to put in some effort to think, before deciding to throw in the downpayment for an apartment/condo).

Crime rate
How do you fancy getting your everyday stuff stolen every now and then? Stuffs like shoes, sandals, undergarments? Or even worse, getting held up with a machete while the robbers ransack your goddamn house? It is a fucking problem, I tell you. I have a friend whose place is so damn fucked up, that he even got his dog stolen! (it was one of those fancy ass dogs).

Horrible neighbors
I’ve had neighbors from hell before (that’s why I hate neighbors, it’s a trauma I carried from my childhood). I had neighbors who’d rear chickens with her rotten leftover rice (whom I’ve written about here), and another Indian family whose sons would boom box the night away in drunken stupor and house fights. One day, a couple of the sons murdered the older brother and all of them were thrown in prison leaving the old mom behind (it was surreal). But your worst nightmare would be a neighbor who would rent out his/her unit to a Bangla, who in turn will grow more comrades from the mud, start chopping trees down, build ballistas, war machines and whatnots and before you realize, you’re dealing with hordes of them showing up at every corner of the neighborhood flashing war paints on their genitals to your young daughters.

Garbage collection
And do you believe there are places where the garbage truck won’t go? It’s not in their area of coverage. Or maybe some council-man did something stupid to piss off the garbage collection contractor and as a result of that, landfill in your neighborhood. It can be a sore sight to behold, and you’d be living in filth, and before long, stray animals and flies start to appear and be too close to your comfort in your own home.

Electricity disruptions
There are some jinxed area in Malaysia that have electricity disruptions so frequent, that if everytime the homeowner gets a buck from a black out, the homeowner would get to buy a new house with the money before he/she finishes the original mortgage. Ask the people in my wife’s hometown. Every household has their own generator for a reason. Stuff like these probably won’t be outlined in the brochure for your brand new apartment. You’ve got to soak it in for years, before you know it is an actual problem.

Parking problems
For some fucked up reasons, our governments (both federal/state) aren’t very good at city planning. A lot of apartments and buildings do not get ample parking lots because it is not part of the requirements to get the occupancy permit. Booyah! you get people parking all over the place. That’s when traffic jam becomes rampant, and going to/from from your home could be the nightmare instead of going to the office. There are shitloads of places with such problem in Penang. Ask your Penang friends.

Just to name a few.

Things like these can only percolate and show up later in years, and there’s very little you can do about it other than taking a chance to get some advice from a soothsayer. So, the question is, how can you mitigate these risks? Simple – buy a used unit. A used apartment/condo unit is a tested experiment, tried and true to its current status. You’d know who are the neighbors, and whether it has a crime problem. You’d know if there is an erratic garbage collection schedule and if parking/blackout is going to be a constant headache for you. Sure, it’s going to be harder to find, and most likely going to cost more – but it will still be a good trade off for all the bad deals you didn’t see coming above…

Both my 2 properties were bought used. I paid a little bit more, but I have less problems to worry about. I’m just saying, you do the thinking…

I have a couple of friends who have been waiting for the iPhone 7 for months.

When it was finally revealed a few weeks ago, I could tell that they’re somewhat disappointed… but instead of showing their disappointment overtly about it, they feigned excitement about the product… which sickened me. And one of them even expressed that he’d still buy it despite its glaring shortcomings. I mean, what the fuck’s that all about!? One minute that guy complains about the stupid phone not having a goddamn headphone jack, and the next minute he wants to spend a fortune buying that piece of crap! That was when I realized that this isn’t really about a product being good or bad… it’s about the perceived social status being seen with a fucking iPhone.

So, despite being a crappier phone than it already was in the line, I think this goddamn iPhone 7 could actually still sell well. Thanks to you morons. One of my whore hound booze buddy, who is an iPhone fanboy, uses his fucking iPhone to boost his self confidence (or the lack of). He’s definitely going to get one when it is available. Nevermind that he doesn’t even fucking know how to use 80% of the phone’s features (he isn’t smart enough to even pair a fucking bluetooth device with it). He just needs one to start a conversation. *flashes phone to a waitress/chick*

“What do you think of my new iPhone? Neat eh?” *starts a conversation.

See my point? Makes me puke in my mouth. I guess the same can be said about people patronizing outlets like Starbucks or Coffee Bean. They just want to be seen pretentiously using an expensive Macbook Air sipping expensive coffee…

If you have been schooling in Malaysia in the 80’s, you’d probably know this term – ‘Projek Susu’. It literally translates to ‘the milk project’ in English.

I know it sounds kinky but no, it is not a porn theme. It is actually a program introduced by the semi-retarded government of Malaysia (then and now) to battle malnutrition amongst the poor students by selling them cheap chocolate milk. Yes, believe it. They’re not free, but were actually sold at a cheap price (hence the ‘semi-retarded’ handle).

At 40 cents a pack (a regular sized 200ml pack), it was none of those branded stuff you find in the grocery store. It was of an unknown home brand, and it had pictures of happy students on it. Clearly a convenient arrangement with a seemingly noble theme aimed to benefit the local cronies more than to nourish the skinny ass children… but what do we know? We kids were crazy about it. Like, who doesn’t love chocolate milk? That thing probably had melamine or antifreeze in it, we loved it all the same.

A couple of times a year (or a few, I can’t remember), the school teachers would give out forms for students to order this stuff. And those rich kids, would order by the dozens. And the poor ones like me, could only watch in envy as my fellow rich classmates getting help from the teaching staffs to carry heaps of those chocolate milk by the cartons to their desks. With only 20 cents a day as pocket money, I couldn’t afford even 1 pack of this shit. To buy a pack means I had to refrain from food/drink for 2 days at school and that’s just sad. And I certainly could not ask money from my mom to buy some because I’d get spanking instead of money from her (trust me, it doesn’t sound that important to your nutritional needs when you tell your mom that you wanted money to buy some ‘chocolate milk’).

But on and off, I’d manage to steal some coins from my mom’s piggy bank to buy myself a pack – and that was how I found momentary happiness. I’d savor it by sipping so slowly like it was brewed from an ancient cask, and absorb whatever fucking nutrients milked from a local diseased cow in a farm somewhere in Selangor and experience kid orgasm at the same time. Those rich kids probably never tasted the ‘projek susu’ the way I did back then.

Today, I can afford shitloads of these chocolate milk, and drink till my joints are inflamed… but they never taste as good as those that I’d bought with those stinky old coins from my mom’s piggy bank.